Tag Archives: Hamlet

I stumbled upon this video today and wondered how reading William Shakespeare’s Hamlet might connect to a very real calamity in Cape Town, South Africa, where, after a three-year drought, water levels are almost at zero.

I had a chance to work with some wonderful teachers a few days and I wondered out loud whether students need the teacher to play the role of the ‘bridger’: that is to say, the teacher needs to show students how any lesson bridges or connects to ‘real life’ — or anything for that matter.

So, with that in mind, I wondered how might we connect Hamlet to the water emergency in Cape Town?

(The reason, for this exercise, I have chosen Hamlet is that it is used widely, usually in senior grade levels, and I wanted to explore how a ‘core’ text such as Hamlet might be used to connect to other issues and topics.)

Problem-solving:

What makes for effective problem solving? What are the criteria to effective problem solving?

What do effective problem solvers do when faced with a very difficult problem?

How does a person have to think, behave, interact with others, speak in order to effectively solve a problem?

Is Hamlet an effective problem addresser / solver? Why or why not?

How did the people and the government of Cape Town, South Africa handle their problem? According to our criteria, did they effectively address their problem?

Compare the crisis of Cape Town to Hamlet.

Is it possible to place both of these crises on the same scale of urgency? That is to say, is Hamlet’s personal problem as urgent or critical as Cape Town’s water problem? If we use a form of meter to ‘measure’ the intensity of a crisis, where would Hamlet’s problem fall on that meter according to a) him? b) his friends and family? c) his country? Why do you say that?

Extension:

What if I started off my entire unit with that essential question: What makes for effective problem solving? Or the other question: What do effective problem solvers do when faced with a major, seemingly unsolvable crisis-level problem? And then what if we used Hamlet as case-study or a base-line or a comparison in amongst other texts, such as Apollo 13 or The Martian or the Cape Town water crisis?

And then what if we tap into the work of Garfield Gini-Newman and The Critical Thinking Consortium who promote ‘criterial thinking’, which is making a sound decision based on criteria and evidence?

And once we have that thinking framework, what if students were invited to engage in free reading and they were to look for other ‘case studies’ of how people solve problems?

And what if I asked these students to write about how they have solved problems in their own lives?

Last question: Is Hamlet the best ‘vehicle’ for exploring this topic?

UPDATE:

The Cape Town water crisis video explores the impact the Day Zero water initiative had on citizens in the city, particularly those below or at the poverty line, who tend to be people of colour. An area to explore could be the potential impact a solution might have upon another person, a group, society in general. For example, how do Hamlet’s choices impact others? Is this solution still effective then?

What wisdom might we take — both positive and negative — from Hamlet’s story and the Cape Town initiative that we could use as lessons for our own lives both now and in the future?

While exploring Dr. Seuss’ Bartholomew and the Oobleck as a text for my children, I was struck with an idea:another lens through which I could look at this book. My Learning Coordinator colleague, A. Gilbert, and I have put forth the idea to secondary teachers of reading picture books in high school English classrooms, and this book might work.

Specifically, it might be interesting to explore the nature of leadership. Jeffrey Wilhelm promotes the idea of re-framing our lessons through an essential question, as explained in his book Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry.

Perhaps this book could be used to set up an exploration into the nature of leadership and the essential question: What is the nature of good leadership? What, then, is bad leadership?

Another essential question could be: What is the role of the ‘common person’ when faced with ‘bad’ leadership? What is my responsibility when faced with injustice?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to use this question and then Bartholomew and the Oobleck for Grade 12 students who then studied George Orwell’s 1984 to find out those answers? And then possibly studied Hamlet with the same essential questions?

Bartholomew, for example, confronts King Derwin of Didd,

“You may be a mighty king,” he said. “But you’re sitting in oobleck up to your chin. And so is everyone else in your land. And if you won’t even say you’re sorry, you’re no sort of king at all!”

It might be interesting to ask students: is this what good leadership looks like? Is this confrontation the responsibility of Bartholomew?

Indeed, the more I think about this book, the more I sense it was written as a commentary on leadership. (And this is also supported by the fact that some of Dr. Seuss’ books are meant to be commentaries on certain topics, such as fascism in Yertle the Tertle or destroying the environment in The Lorax.)

I think the commentary on leadership was driven home to me when I happened to look at the back cover of Bartholomew and the Oobleck, which depicts a person having the Oobleck land on their head, to their obvious dismay under the words “Beware the Oobleck!”

If the Oobleck is a metaphor for a ill-conceived idea from a detached and capricious leader, then what might be the lesson for teachers and leaders in the education system?

Is this a commentary by Seuss about how the common person must pick up the tab, so to speak, and bear the brunt of the short-sighted, common-sense-defying ideas of a power-wielding leader?

I wonder if this book should be required reading for leadership and teacher candidates…

Imagine you’re giving a presentation where you can read the mind of every person in the room. You’d have an amazing ability to adjust to your audience’s needs and emotions. That’s the backchannel.

Using Twitter at social media conferences has become a great way to do just that. But Twitter isn’t appropriate for every situation.

Your audience isn’t on Twitter.

You don’t want the discussion to be public.

You need to see only relevent updates.

That’s where TodaysMeet comes in. TodaysMeet gives you an isolated room where you can see only what you need to see, and your audience doesn’t need to learn any new tools like hash tags to keep everything together.

TodaysMeet is a good way to have a quick convo in a relatively quiet place.

TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in realtime.

Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs.

The backchannel is everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter.

The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give youthe most immediate feedback you’ll ever get.

Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.

Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.

Here’s an example of Today’s Meet being used in my Grade 12 University level English class as we navigate our way through Hamlet.

CAVEAT:

When my grade 12’s first got on our Today’s Meet ‘meeting room’, their habits of doing and saying whatever they want on the Wild West internet took over and a few of the students started writing ‘shout-out’s’ to other students — and to me — such as, “Whaddup” or “Mr. Cooke brings the boom”. And then some students started to get a little cheeky or mildly inappropriate by making jokes, including joking about the word — wait for it– ‘butt’. Needless to say, I had to simultaneously chastise them for writing that while reminding them that this is for school purposes and that it is permanent, and that I would shut it down if they couldn’t use it properly. They did settle down, and what transpired was a really interesting and, I think, powerful experience in the classroom — using the ‘backchannel’. But because their thoughts appear live right in front of them, they thought it was ‘cool’ and they were all engaged.